The invention relates to the field of printing, more specifically, to a method for selecting one of a plurality of print modes for printing a document and to a printing apparatus.
Image quality and throughput are two important attributes when printing documents using a printing device, like an inkjet printing device or an electrophotographic printing device, like a laser printer. To extract the maximum potential from a printer, a deep knowledge of the available print modes and, more specifically, how the print modes perform in terms of image quality and throughput, is required, which is even more important for images that contain a mix of lines and renders or area fills.
There is a substantial image quality and throughput performance difference between print modes with high and low number of passes, which makes it very difficult for a user to correctly select an optimal print mode for a given content of a hard copy, like, for example, a plot. Conventional approaches require a user of a printing device to learn what the optimal print mode for a specific kind of printout is by trial and error, which, naturally, has an impact on the user's experience and, of course, the printer usability perception.
While methods for automatically selecting print modes are known in the field, such methods only take into account banding as the main image quality attribute to optimize. While such approaches may be of interest for printing documents having primarily graphical elements, same are useless for printing documents where lines are usually mixed with renders and small area fills. More specifically, conventional approaches try to find an optimum print mode for achieving an optimum area fill uniformity, but line drawings are not taken into account at all. In addition, such conventional approaches look at different portions of a document to be printed for determining an optimum area fill, which, in turn, may result in a change of the print mode while printing out a page of the document. This may result in artifacts at the portion where the print mode is changed, i.e. visible image quality defects may be generated.